- Kamal Harris’ health plan: Medicare for all, with private insurers participating – like Medicare Advantage.
- Surprise: low voter turnout benefits Democrats, not Republicans. “The likeliest voters are Democrats, while the ones who are less likely to vote are Republicans.”
- Message to the White House: inflation isn’t caused by greed. (WaPo)
- Estimating the cost of our bureaucratic health insurance payment system.
- What happens when you give people $1,000 a month with no string attached? They spend it. They also work less. “For every $1 of free money received, participants’ earnings dropped by at least 12 cents and total household income fell by at least 21 cents.”
Category: Cost of Healthcare
Should You See a Dental Therapist?
Many Americans cannot afford to spend $1,000 a year on dental care for mostly routine maintenance. That’s not even counting unexpected costs like root canals, dental implants and crowns. Too many people put off dental care until it’s an emergency and their teeth need extensive care. Dental care is an unmet need for much of rural America, and in cities and suburbs as well.
Monday Links
- How politically biased is the new JAMA editor?
- David Friedman on Project 2025.
- Making medical school tuition free does not produce more primary care physicians or send more graduates to underserved areas.
- Claim: more than 100 million Americans are without regular access to primary care.
- Chinese government officials are implementing mandatory testing of large language models to make sure they “embody core socialist values.”
- Everything to know about occupational licensing. Recommended
Saturday Links
- The number of active drug shortages in the U.S. is 300, down from an all-time high of 323. But nothing to cheer about.
- Microsoft global outage forces health systems to cancel appointments, delay procedures.
- Everything to know about the theory of language.
- OpenAI’s GPT-4o scored 98 percent on some of the most challenging parts of the US Medical Licensing Examination.
- Happiness seems to increase with the log of absolute income, so going from $50k to $100k has a much larger impact than going from $250k to $300k.
- How the Biden administration interprets “march-in” rights: New guidance explicitly states that the government could march in and seize the patents underlying any product officials think is overpriced, in fields from AI to aeronautics. Recommended.